Can a union of love become so radical that it outlives earthly existence? Surely you have wished for such a thing: to be reunited with a departed mother, friend or lover - especially if you have cared for this person right up to their end?
Is Love truly stronger than death?
One Episcopal priest says, Yes. In fact, when Reverend Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault penned her book's title she meant her words literally. She believes she has touched the edges of the secret passage through which she can walk to reunite with her departed lover. She now walks that path each day.
Her story defies conventional reasoning. But it is also not the stuff of seances. Instead, it likely parallels the experience of many.
To understand this reality-challenging idea we need to imagine that there is no higher or lower state of life & death. There is not a now & a hereafter. Instead, there is an expanded knowing that encompasses life & death on a plane where lovers are separated only by limited thinking.
Dr. Bourgeault describes the kind of lover's resurrection about which every committed couple dreams - a consummation & continuation that begins when one finds & bonds with another. Her story revives the tired word "soulmate."
Hers is the most unusual love story imaginable: no star-crossed, Romeo & Juliet relationship but an account of a radically loving & eternal bond between two clerics: herself & a hermit monk in his late sixties named Rafe.
Although this kind of death-defying bond can presumably be formed between any two caring beings, Reverend Bourgeult's example is based on her physical as well as spiritual connection with her lover. Every divinity school student knows that spirituality & sexuality have deep similarities. Our sexuality is the stuff of life itself. How does sex become part of a holy journey to eternity?
It happens through stages in the development of the couple's souls as they make a "mutual and conscious commitment to bring [their] human love into sympathetic vibration with the sacrificial and giving love that is the font of all creation."
This is the Christian view that this couple embraced. They built their relationship on the granite foundations of Radical Loving Care - the willingness to give one's life for the other. "The willingness to die, on whatever level, for the other's becoming is the practice that gradually transmutes erotic attraction into a force of holy fusion."
Of course, Rafe has died. Of course, their soul-marriage thrives as she waits to join him. They seek their connection through Jesus.
Whether you accept Bourgeault's premise, her story is compelling, especially if you have had, as have I, significant awareness-expanding experiences exposing a much wider consciousnesses. The difference between our everyday view & this broader consciousness is, to use Twain's line, "the difference between a lightning bug and lightning."
Shakespeare suggested so in his oft-quoted line from Act 1 of Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
-Reverend Erie Chapman
Photograph from Erie's film, "Alex Dreaming"
